


the sugar burns her throat

by thedevilbites



Category: Joker (2019)
Genre: Arthur is crazy, But it is raining..., Dark Undertones, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, It was a dark and stormy night..., Knifeplay, Light BDSM, Light Dom/sub, Light Submission, Much banter and snark, She breaks into his apartment, Smut, Sophie is kinda deranged too I suppose, They are so right for each other, creepyish!Sophie, just kidding, mentions of killing, psycho!Arthur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:28:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22250332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilbites/pseuds/thedevilbites
Summary: A jacket, perhaps, would have been helpful. Or, a bra.
Relationships: Sophie Dumond/Arthur Fleck, Sophie Dumond/Joker
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	the sugar burns her throat

**Author's Note:**

> not quite sure where this came 
> 
> also thank you so much nyxovertop for the beta, i would truly be lost without you. check out their stuff it blows my mind !!

The first time it happens, it’s pouring outside, sheets of rain slathering the gelid sidewalk like soldiers marching stoically into battle.

The raindrops are small and sharp and cunning, they attack Sophie’s skin with a vivid ferocity and leave little welts on her arms, raw and pink, and she’s forced to call in sick for her night shift at the bank, shivering as the wind whips violently through her open window while she balances the phone awkwardly on the slope of her shoulder.

It’s late. Gigi’s at her mother’s place for the weekend, and Sophie expected to feel guiltily free with her daughter away, free from the non-stop nagging and picking the salted peanuts out of trail mix and wrestling her into uncomfortable, scratchy clothes, but instead the apartment is filled with a dreary, suffocating silence and even the air feels stifling as it settles thickly in her lungs.

She tells herself that it’s a combination of the stale, smothering atmosphere encircling her and her own lack of self-preservation, or perhaps her morbid curiosity, that has Sophie stumbling down the dim, tattered hallway of her apartment building and towards Arthur’s door, barely remembering to click her own lock in place behind her with shaking, numb hands. 

His door is nestled cozily at the end of the hall, and some part of her mind is frowning as she stops in front of it, demanding to know why the sight of his door washes her with a gentle, trickling current of all things safe and secure and right, but her own home brings her to the delicate brink where annoyance shakes hands with anger inside her head.

But now she leans her forehead against his apartment, the rough, raw wood of his door scraping her sensitive skin, and it feels like she’s missing something. Like she’s an actress starring in a play but can’t seem to remember where she misplaced that one prop for the final scene. 

Her breath is trapped in her throat, hair plastered to her rain-soaked forehead, and Sophie vaguely wonders if she should have worn something other than a pair of stained, grey sweatpants and a thin, camisole top for this excursion. She fingers the flimsy fabric, shivers as a curl of wind brushes past her arm and purses her lips at the goosebumps that rapidly form.

A jacket, perhaps, would have been helpful. Or, a bra. 

But she can’t give her poor outfit choices a second thought because she hears the faint creaking of floorboards behind the door, like in those iconic black-and-white movies her parents used to drag her to see at the cinema when she was little, and she has just enough time to leap back before it swings open on rusty hinges.

Arthur peers out of the doorway, looking mildly amused to see her standing there, her hand still fingering the sheer fabric of her shirt, probably looking like a drenched cat.

He raises an eyebrow. 

“What are you doing here?”

She cracks a hesitant smile at him. “I’m breaking into your apartment, of course.”

The reminder of his earlier actions didn’t seem to amuse him as much as she thought. It was only a couple days after she had seen Arthur—no, the Joker—sitting on her couch, fingering a cigarette like some kind of gangster blending into the shadows, and Sophie still hadn’t decided herself how she felt about his intrusion. (Why hadn’t she called the cops, or told anyone?)

“Oh, is that what this is?” He curls her lip, and waves one hand in a little ‘up down’ motion, gesturing sardonically at her sudden appearance in front of his door. 

“Yes,” she insists, “I thought you might find it ironic.”

He narrows his eyes at her, tongue darting out to wet his lower lip, and Sophie just knows that he’ll close the door right in her face because, honestly, why would he let her in?

But to her surprise, he lets the door swing fully open, gestures peremptorily behind him, and now she’s standing face-to-face with Arthur, who is wearing nothing but a pair of simple, black joggers. He’s shirtless. _Shirtless._

Sophie can’t tear her eyes away from his chest, there’s something terribly unsettling, wrong (captivating) about his body. The rawness of it. How it seems to scream at her. She flutters her eyes carefully along his clavicle, memorizes the subtle way in which it protrudes from his body, so much so that she thinks she could cut herself on his collarbones if she tried. She glances down to his strangely muscled abdomen, his ribcage, not even trying to conceal her curious gaze as she looks lower still. He’s so thin she can count every rib on his body, can see the defined, rigid outline of every muscle, how his stomach caves inward like a dark, sloping cavern, receding impossibly further and further into his body with each erratic breath he takes. 

She looks up from his chest, from the paper-thin layer of skin that looks as though he’d disintegrate into flakes of ash if she blew on him, and meets Arthur’s eyes.

His gaze is magnetic. _He_ is magnetic. That’s all she can think about because then she’s getting sucked into the flickering smudge of even amusement written across his eyes (there’s danger hidden there, she realizes, danger that has burrowed itself into his retinas and is waiting, begging to come out), and she finds herself taking a step closer towards him, even as part of her registers that he’s been grinning wildly, madly down at her for quite some time. She’s pulled by some sickeningly instinctual desire to go and wipe that smear of pain from beneath his eyelids with her thumb. 

Arthur’s tongue darts out again to lick his lips, the smile dropping from his face as he does so. He suddenly looks normal now, blank-faced and composed. She clenches her hand into a weak fist at her side, tracks the movement of his tongue, saliva-slick, with bated breath, leans into him, into _them._

“So, are you coming in?” 

Sophie snaps her eyes away faster than she thought she could move, and the charged atmosphere dissipates around them.

“Yes, obviously.” She deadpans, defensive, but she at least has the good sense to look embarrassed after she was caught ogling her neighbor. She hopes he can’t see the faint blush tingeing her cheeks when she slides past him, careful not to touch his body as she weaves her way into his apartment.

The first thing she notices after she quietly slips out of her sneakers is that it’s surprisingly normal, and she wrinkles her brow at that because she usually makes a habit of not judging people, and she really doesn’t know what she expected to see. Why she automatically assumed his apartment would be abnormal, however justified that thought may be, is still rude on her part. So she smooths her face into an impassive smile, and turns back around to face Arthur.

“Where can I sit?”

He cocks his head to the side from where he’s leaning against the door, feet crossed at the ankles in surprisingly delicate manner, but she’s thrown off by the way he has one hand stretched languidly above his head, the movement contorting his body so that his pants sink lower on his narrow hips. She can see the muscled v-line of his pelvis from her angle, and, vaguely uncomfortable but not really sure why, she stumbles towards his couch without his permission. Relaxes onto the soft cushions with a gasping breath. 

He narrows his eyes at her, skimming the length of her slumped body with quiet calculation, and she is not, _she is not,_ suppressing a shiver. “Why’d you ask if you’re going to sit where you like?” 

“You didn’t say anything.” Her voice sounds strange, hoarse and bitter in the back of her throat. She’s blushing again.

“Well, you didn’t give me a chance to answer.” His voice smooths down her body, an impossible combination of velvet and gravel, and she can feel the moment his eyes lock onto her chest, notice how her breasts are clearly visible through the white, sheer fabric of her shirt, the gentle blush-pink of her nipples. 

“You took too long,” she stutters, voice turning into a slow, liquidy whisper as Arthur pushes himself off of the door frame and starts to walk towards her, all long legs and the too-loud sound of his bare feet slapping against the damp, wooden floor.

The walls seem to close in on her with each step he takes, alarm bells flashing red and blue sirens in her head with no snooze button, and she has to clench her hands together in her lap, white-knuckled and tense, to keep from visibly shaking.

He pauses in front of her, squeezing in between the coffee table in front of the couch and where she’s sitting. She can sense, feel, the pressure building up around them, higher and higher like an elastic rubber band about to snap. He’s tall, Sophie faintly realizes, and from where he’s standing she’s eye-to-eye with his pelvis, but she’s definitely not going to look up at his face because that would require movement on her part, and with the way her brain is screaming at her to _run,_ she knows that even a slight head tilt would send her body scrambling for the door. (And she doesn’t want to leave, now, does she?)

And then Arthur _leans down,_ bending fluidly at the waist as if he was a ballet dancer as he does so, and Sophie has never been more terrified in her entire life.

All the hairs on her arms stand on end, and she can _feel_ the warmth emanating from his body as he surrounds her, traps her, with his chest, and she can _smell him,_ the decidedly not-all-unpleasant swirl of some faint, outdated cologne and an entirely raw sensation of man. She’s sure he notices the way her heart skips a beat when he leans into her neck, hovers over her rapid-fire pulse point and shoves his mouth against her skin, his chest is brushing hers slightly, and the physical contact is _electrifying._ She can feel the sharp press of his teeth against her throat and she wonders for one desperate, paranoid moment whether he’s going to rip into her skin with his mouth. 

Her body is pumping so much adrenaline that she feels giddy, wants to move and twitch and tap her fingers frantically, but at the same time what little self-preservation she has is telling her to shut the fuck up and freeze, as if she’s a sheep who can trick the wolf into leaving her be if she stands still long enough.

A beat of silence passes, where all that can be heard is her sporadic, panting breath mingling with his calm, even ones, so slow she might not have realized he was breathing if she wasn’t this close to him.

“So,” he begins, nuzzling the long column of her throat, a predator playing with his food before he eats it, and Sophie has to physically grind her teeth together and dig her fingers into the too-soft, worn-out leather of the couch to keep from making a sound. She can feel the sharp scrape of his five o’clock shadow against her sensitive skin, and she’s all too aware that one upward slant of her hips brings their bodies completely flush against each other, pelvises pressing into one another, and a hot, electric coil weaves itself into tighter knots in the pit of her stomach. 

He whispers something into her skin, and this time Sophie can’t hold back the way her lips part slightly as his indistinguishable words vibrate along her spine, the way she tips her head back to expose her neck fully to him. Her eyes flutter shut and she refuses to open them, cowardice overriding her other instincts. 

“You gonna move over?” 

His question catches her off guard. “What?” She croaks, voice embarrassingly low and husky.

“I said, are you going to move over?”

He’s doing something delightfully satisfying to her neck, light scratching sensations that feel as though he’s physically scraping at her jugular with his nails. She has to shake her head a little to focus. 

“Why—why am I moving over?” She hates how breathy she sounds.

He chuckles, not quite a laugh, but it’s low and thrilling and poisonous, makes her stomach do a flip-flop, and it only dawns on her now that he hasn’t really laughed this entire time.

“You’re taking up all the room on the couch.”

Oh.

And then she’s boldly sliding away from him, slipping onto her back and shouldering up the couch until her head hits the farthest armrest away from him. She stretches her entire body along the length of the couch, raises her arms delicately over head and crosses her legs as if she’s an aristocrat modeling from some estranged artist. Then she tips her head to the side and smiles, all teeth and no lips, up at him. 

“I guess you’ll just have to lie on me instead.” It’s not the classiest line, but it gets the job done because the corner of Arthur’s mouth pulls up in a slow slant of smirk and he’s grinning down at her hungrily, like he wants to corner her with his body and devour her whole.

But then Arthur stands up fully, turns smoothly on the heel of his foot, and walks away from her into the kitchen. 

Sophie feels like a bucket of ice water has just been dumped on her head. Did she read the situation wrong? No, no she couldn’t have. She didn’t. Sophie doesn’t know a lot of things, dropped out of high school at 16 to take care of Gigi and never really started up her education again, but if there’s one thing she does know it’s the way a man looks at a woman and wants her. 

And Arthur Fleck most decidedly does, did, she supposes, until he abandoned her on the couch, wanton and dissatisfied. She’s not used to being denied. 

So she’s angry and bruised and furious when she marches deeper into Arthur’s apartment after him, blinking wildly with fervent anger as she sweeps her eyes across the cabinets, the speckled marble counter clustered with pots and pans and a sticky sandwich that looks way too old to be edible at this point, and fuck she doesn’t think she’s ever been this pissed off in her entire life.

The kitchen is empty of life, besides the possible organisms lurking in the questionable sandwich, so she swivels madly towards the bedroom without a second thought, not caring about indecency or manners or how appropriate something is for once in her fucking life. She’s clenching and unclenching her hands into fists, nails grinding into the soft flesh of her palms as if she’s preparing for a fight when she practically throws herself through the plain, white door to his room.

His room is completely pitch-black, and it’s only because of the window of light from the door that she’s able to make out the lumped shape of his bed, bare of any blankets, and an armchair standing in the corner. Sophie turns around to find the light switch, but, as if one cue, the door swings shut behind her, and she’s left shrouded in darkness. 

It’s so dark that she can barely see the rough outline of her hand as she waves it in front of her face, let alone find faint shape of a light now, so she settles on squinting into the black abyss of his room. 

Which is once again empty. 

Except, just as she turns to leave a faint rustling catches her attention, and she tracks the sound to his closet, inches closer to it, plain and bare and seemingly white like his bedroom door, but then stops dead in her tracks because she can see the fuzzy shape of a _fucking hand sticking out of the closet._

His hand, she realizes dumbly, surprised she can even make it out, and before she can stop herself she’s being pulled towards Arthur without even thinking, fear and anger and pain taking a backseat as her legs move without her own volition. She stops a couple paces away, but then his fingers do a little fluttery motion and she’s hesitantly skimming her fingers down his own, inching towards his palm before decidedly grabbing his hand, feeling like she’s being escorted into a carriage, or to a ball in one of those stupid story books, pink, poofy dress and all.

She barely has enough time to register the feel of his skin against her own, how warm and strangely intimate touching him is, because then she’s being pulled inside so fast she’s surprised she doesn’t smack face-first into the double doors.

She falls into the darkness of the closet, tumbling onto the shag carpet and all around her is darkness, the swirling shapes of black clouds as they dance in front of her eyes in a sea of nothingness. There’s a little, squirming feeling in the pit of her stomach and it’s making her legs quiver, her body shudder and shake and it’s _fear,_ she realizes, wrapping her arms around her waist because she feels much too exposed in this chaotic web of blackness.

But then she inhales, and smells the familiar tinge of musk and spice and _Arthur._ Her body relaxes but her mind is running on overdrive because they’re a tangle of messy limbs and hard angles, woven together in such a way where she can’t tell where she ends and he begins.

But then she sees the gleam of a knife, impossibly, overwhelmingly bright, and everything changes.

She’s scrambling away from him faster than she can think, kicking and biting and tearing because she refuses to die, not like this, and sticks one hand blindly into the air and thanks whatever Almighty God there is that she lands on the door handle to the closet, heart pumping in her ears and blood rushing through her veins and everything ringing and shrieking and gasping at her as she pulls the door open and—

She doesn’t even register that he’s moved until she’s on her back, the hot spark of pain blooming at the top of her head from where she was thrown onto the floor, and then she’s numbly rolling around, willing her muscles to move as she struggles against the electric agony in her spine and the thick clump of pain clogging her throat. But the brief moment where she’s incapacitated is enough for the dynamic to shift.

Arthur climbs on top of her, and Sophie feels the heavy weight of his body as he settles, straddling her hips and she didn’t even realize that he was this strong, that his legs could squeeze so tight around her body she can’t even move an inch away from him. Her vision swims as the roar in her head fades to a dull thud, and she feels him gather her hands from where they lay docile at her sides, groans a little because his grip is harsh and grating and his nails bite into the soft skin around her wrists as he holds them, stretches them above her head until a spasm shoots up her back, clacking against each vertebrae in her spine. 

And then the knife is at her throat. Sophie stops breathing.

The blade is gelid against her neck, and she’s afraid to move, to swallow, because suddenly he’s pressing it deeper into her flesh, gaze sharp and cold and rigid as it digs into her, and Sophie knows that soon it’ll break the skin and she’ll bleed out all over this cheap, dirty carpet. (She’ll die locked away in a closet with a madman she was never supposed to meet, never supposed to come out and _play_ with.)

But the knife doesn’t break the skin. Arthur just sits there, evaluating the terror no doubt etched into every line of her face with a clinical frown, peering at the frantic darting of her eyes as she tries to stop herself from twisting violently in his grasp. 

He’s got the knife poised and angled towards her jugular, just enough pressure on the soft skin of her throat that she knows he’s juggling a should-I-or-shouldn’t-I battle in his head, teetering on the brink of killing her or letting her live. She wonders what he’s thinking, all blank-faced and deliberate, controlled movements as he leans closer to her. 

She knows he’s killed people, Murray Franklin and Randall and those three on the subway, hell, maybe even Thomas Wayne if she really thinks about it. The news claims he’s unstable, certifiably insane, and the whole police force is out hunting for him. He started a clown rebellion, a riot, a fucking movement and if Sophie had any ounce of sense she would scream, now. The neighbors would hear, certainly, but for some reason, she doesn’t. 

(If she had any ounce of sense, she wouldn’t have marched up to his door and elbowed her way inside. Wouldn’t have sat there and done fucking nothing when he broke into her house while she was cradling her sleeping daughter in her arms.)

And because it’s late, it’s late and she’s tired and she very well might die soon, because she’s delirious and furious and she tangoed with the Joker and expected to _win,_ she murmurs through cracked dry lips and red-rimmed eyes,

“Come here often?”

Arthur blinks, chuckles, and suddenly a full-blown laugh erupts from his mouth, loud and deep and victorious and she can feel how it shakes his whole body, how he trembles and burns and roars until the walls and the floor and the roof is shaking and pitching and gasping all around them, and it’s infectious and dizzying and overwhelmingly alive as his laugh slices through her fear like it’s nothing but a thin sheet of paper, and then she’s laughing too, pitching her head back, wild and free and not even caring about the sting across her neck as the knife gently licks at her jugular. She laughs so hard that her stomach hurts and desperate tears are squeezing out of her eyes, her elation mingling and winding around his happiness until they are both cackling like two hyenas in the dead of night.

It’s an odd, all-encompassing, purely _wonderful_ feeling. 

She can’t get enough, not of him or this or them, the slow swirl of possibilities alight underneath their eyelids as they move together like a unicellular organism, snorting as their laughter fades and scoots over, making room for the wispy calmness that quietly creeps into the closet.

“You left me,” Sophie states after a beat, way too petulant and accusing than she can afford to be right now.

Arthur smirks, hair waving in his face, almost brushing the tip of her nose as he leans into her, and Sophie can feel every movement he makes in the flex of his hips against her own.

“Well,” he momentarily tightens his grip on her wrists, hard enough that she has to clamp her teeth down onto her bottom lip to keep from whimpering, and Sophie recognizes the pain for what it is: a warning. 

She keeps her hands where they are when he releases them, focuses on that little gleam in Arthur’s eyes as he continues, “I wanted to have some fun.”

“This is supposed to be fun?” 

“Isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

He wrinkles his nose, wags his head from side to side in what she guesses is a playful, almost endearing, gesture, and then dips down low, suddenly, buries his mouth into the side of her neck and inhales, “My, my, someone’s getting a little braver.”

She tries to focus on his words, and not the feel of his mouth on her skin, goes to answer him, to tartly retort, but Arthur chooses this moment to lick a long line up her neck, tongue caressing the hinge of her jaw and she can do little else but gasp as he slides hot and wet and slow across her skin.

“You’re killing me,” she gasps, eyes fluttering closed.

“Not yet,” he murmurs, the words deafening in the small, enclosed space and her heart skips a beat.

“Will you?”

“Will I what?” he asks innocently, grins against her skin where he’s now brushing against her collarbone, shimmying lower down her body with his hips, but she knows he knows what she means. He just wants her to say it.

Swallows. “Are you going to kill me?”

“Yes.” The answer is immediate, and she feels like he’s just slapped her in the face.

Her heart sinks, and then she remembers that her hands are free and she could, theoretically, grab the knife laying at her neck, wrestle it away from him and wrench it through his stomach, make her escape, she just needs to find a phone and call 9-1-1 before he comes at her…

“Don’t even think about it, sweetness.”

Sophie chooses to ignore the little thrill that goes through her body at the pet name, at the accompanying inhuman growl, hopes she sounds gullible and naive enough when she asks, “Think about what?”

He’s nearing her stomach now, rucking up her thin top so her chest is exposed. She shudders lightly; his hands are cold. 

“It’s rude to lie,” he whispers against her stomach, and Sophie hisses when his free hand skirts up her body, plunges his nails into her skin right below her breasts as some sort of lewd punishment.

“Admit it, you were thinking about killing me.”

“Hypothetically,” she blurts before she can stop herself, as if that would make it any better. 

“Mm,” he makes a ‘maybe’ motion with his hand, leaves the knife balancing on the tip of her throat as he does so.

The knife is free. Now, she really can grab it, and—

“You try anything and I’ll carve your eyeballs out of their sockets.”

She blanches. “You wouldn’t.”

He’s in front of her in a second, inches away from her face as his mouth breaks into a wry grin, and she thinks she’s getting whiplash from his mood swings, “go on, sweetness, go ahead and test me.”

She shouldn’t find this so attractive, the wrath and barely-contained madness lighting up his eyes like reflective firelight, and she suddenly wants to antagonize him, to test him, as he so eloquently put it, and that thought comes with the staggering revelation that she likes this, likes him, wants him to hurt her.

She stares him dead in the eye when she picks up the knife, and his answering grin breaks that final barrier inside of her that was struggling, shaking with the effort of holding back something deep and dark and dangerous that was already leaking out of the seams.

 _Kill me,_ she whispers with her eyes, with her soul, too afraid to say it out loud as she stares up at him. 

Hours later, when he slips the knife into the softest part of her neck, Sophie Dumond is left in a pile of blood and limbs and the hot sludgy mess of fear and hesitation and worries that coated her body like a shield. (Like a cage.)

The person who steps out of the closet, fresh and clean and so very very new, laces her fingers with the monster by her side and grins up at the Joker, wild and careless and free.

She is reborn as _his_ , a gleaming, grinning demon by his side.

**Author's Note:**

> it's fun to play with the joker/sophie dynamic, and i think sophie represents harley in the movie maybe kinda sorta so perhaps that's where this came from
> 
> hope you enjoyed, lovelies!


End file.
